In recent years, there has been rapid growth in mobile computing and other wireless data services, as well as growth in fixed wireless access technologies. These services have the benefit of not requiring wiring between nodes to support the networking and potentially allow for communication where it could be difficult to provide a wired infrastructure. These services can be used to provide high quality telephony, high-speed Internet access, multimedia and other broadband services.
These wireless devices are tied together through their use of common networking infrastructures. Such wireless networking infrastructures include Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) standards 802.11, specifying an over-the-air interface between a wireless client and a base station or between two wireless clients. The standards allow for transmission between 1-54 Mbps in 2.4 GHz or 5 GHz bands and allow for use frequency hopping spread spectrum (FHSS), direct sequence spread spectrum (DSSS), or an orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) encoding scheme. In order for the wireless devices to properly interact, they must all conform to the same standard, or overlapping standards.
However, even if the wireless devices conform to the established standards, there can be issues that arise. Devices that strictly conform to a standard may operate in a manner that a majority of the other wireless devices do not. One example occurs with IEEE 802.11 channels, where each channel has a known width. “Well behaved” devices, which are the vast majority of the devices operating in the world today, send and receive packets in the center of that channel. Most devices do not watch for packets out at the edges of the channel. This is a basic tradeoff between channel width and general receive sensitivity. This is particularly an issue with direct conversion radios, a popular method for implementing the exchange of data. If the entire width of the channel is monitored, then general sensitivity would be reduced.
When a wireless device sends and receives packets toward the edge of the channel, the packets can be lost if only the center is being monitored and the device may become disassociated from other network elements. While the monitored portions of the channel can be widened, this has deficiencies in that if one of these poorly behaved network devices are not be accessed, there would be a loss in receive sensitivity and some compatibility issues occur, which can be hard to resolve. Such a problem could also be dealt with by increasing a tolerable number of dropped packets, but this would affect decisions wireless devices make during roaming, resulting in decreased reliability.
Thus, there is a need in the prior art to have wireless devices that have an adaptable sensitivity to other wireless devices that operate outside the norms of most of the devices in the wireless network. Such adaptable sensitivity should allow for a wide variety of the devices to communicate without adversely affecting the reliability of communications within the network.